East Texas, March 19, 1687.

The man who gave France half a continent walked into a stand of tall grass and never walked out again.

René Robert Cavalier, Seur de la Salle, had spent the better part of two decades carving his name across the map of North America.

Born in 1643 to a wealthy merchant family in Rouen, he had abandoned a path toward the Jesuit

priesthood at 22, finding the contemplative life unsuited to a man whose blood ran hot with

ambition. He sailed for New France, nearly penniless,

having surrendered his inheritance upon taking his initial vows, and landed on the island of Montreal

in 1667, with nothing but nerve and an appetite for unmapped country. Within a few years, LaSalle was ranging through the Great Lakes

wilderness, trading furs, building forts, and dreaming bigger than any Frenchman before him.

He befriended the Count de Frontenac, the fighting governor of New France,

and together they extended French military power westward,

establishing Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario

and holding the Iroquois in Czech. LaSalle prospered. He controlled a lion's share of the fur

trade. But prosperity bored him. Word of a mighty river, the Indians called Messissippi, drew him like

a compass needle swinging north. In February, 1682, LaSalle and a party of

some 40 Europeans and Native Americans pushed canoes into the icy current of the Mississippi

and started south. They passed the mouth of the Missouri, built a small fort near present-day Memphis,

and negotiated their way through the territory of the Arkansas tribe.

On April 9, 1682, the expedition reached the Gulf of Mexico.

LaSalle planted a cross, hoisted the Bourbon banner, and in the name of King Louis XIV, claimed the entire Mississippi River Basin for France.

He called it Louisiana, one stroke of imperial theater, and France held the most fertile half of North America.

The Sun King smiled upon his explorer. In 1684, Louis XIV approved LaSalle's plan to return by sea and establish a permanent colony at the mouth of the Great River.

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